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Compassion and Meditation: The Spiritual Dynamic between Buddhism and Christianity QUOTES

Compassion and Meditation: The Spiritual Dynamic between Buddhism and Christianity QUOTES

21 " There are many greedy and clever human animals in this world, but few human beings. Authentic human beings are so rare that I would even go so far as to say that we do not live in a truly human world. "

― Jean-Yves Leloup , Compassion and Meditation: The Spiritual Dynamic between Buddhism and Christianity

22 " There are different styles and levels of pleasure. Of course there is the pleasure of the separate self, with its need for recognition. This ego thrives on seduction, but its type of pleasure is constantly under threat. There will always be people who are not attracted to you, and there is bound to come a time—whether from fatigue, illness, or age—when your power of seduction fades. For those who know only this level of pleasure, growing old is a dreadful drama. They stand to lose their power of seduction, upon which their entire sense of identity is built. Only then do they begin to see that their narcissistic image is an illusion. But we have the capacity to awaken to a state of consciousness and being where pleasure is no longer dependent on this ego. I would not describe it as any sort of nonpleasure but a different pleasure, a different quality of relationship. The old “I” has tremendous difficulty in accepting and understanding this pleasure. Nevertheless, there are certain privileged moments in our existence when we are given a taste of this other pleasure, and the ability to appreciate it, and to understand that the old pleasures, the ones to which we are often most attached, are not the only ones. Sometimes we must undergo hardships, breakups, and narcissistic wounds, which shatter the flattering image that we had of ourselves, in order to discover two truths: that we are not who we thought we were; and that the loss of a cherished pleasure is not necessarily the loss of true happiness and well-being. "

― Jean-Yves Leloup , Compassion and Meditation: The Spiritual Dynamic between Buddhism and Christianity